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The ROBOlympic Games
Roland Piquepaille writes "The first International Robot Games, or ROBOlympics, organized by the Robotics Society of America, will take place on March 20th and 21st, 2004 in San Francisco, California. There will be competition for combat and non-combat robots, a World Cup Soccer game, and even a robo-triathlon. More than 400 robots are registered for this robotics competition. And the winners will receive hard cash. Nature tells us the story in 'Robolympics contestants shoot for gold.' More details and references are available in this overview which also includes a very nice photo of two robots, the larger one either fixing or rocking the smaller one. And for your information, ROBOlympics is not sold out. So if you are near San Francisco, it's still time to buy tickets. They cost $15 to $25. Entrance is free for children under 7."
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Population getting more diverse as it gets bigger
Thu Mar 18, 7:29 AM ET
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By Larry Copeland and Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY
Ten years ago, no one in Henry County schools spoke Gujarati. It would have been hard to find someone in the south Atlanta suburb who'd even heard of the language, which is spoken in the state of Gujarat on the western coast of India.
Today, Gujarati is second only to Spanish as the native language of students in the school program called English for Speakers of Other Languages. A decade ago, the county had one ESOL teacher. Now, there are 12, soon to be 13.
"We've been trying to study some of the other counties, to see what they did right and what they did wrong in trying to accommodate these students," says Marian Tillotson, an ESOL teacher in the burgeoning county.
The school system's experience is being replicated across the state and in many other areas of the nation as population growth, diversity and migration reshape the landscape. Everything from education to business, politics and housing is changing. That's especially true in Georgia, which was long a state populated mostly by whites and blacks. (Related story: Census projects more diversity)
Census projections to be released today suggest the U.S. population will increase 49% by 2050, adding about 140 million people.
One of the most visible signs of such population growth is increased racial and ethnic diversity that is helping to fill jobs and create businesses.
In Georgia, Hispanics have migrated in the largest numbers to places with lots of jobs for unskilled laborers - places such as Gainesville, center of the state's poultry industry, and Dalton, which produces carpet. But their numbers are growing in every Georgia county.
"There's not one single county in the state of Georgia that does not have Latinos. We are everywhere," says Sara Gonzalez, president and CEO of the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (news - web sites). She says there are 13,000 to 15,000 Hispanic businesses in the state.
"Entrepreneurship is a cultural thing," she says. "We were never raised with a welfare system in any of our countries, as far as I know. They come here, take whatever job they can, and they start saving, with a goal of owning their own business. That is the tradition."
The Census puts the state's Hispanic population at about 6% of Georgia's 8.2 million people. But Douglas Bachtel, a sociologist and demographer at the University of Georgia, says the actual percentage may be almost twice that.
Georgia's $11.3 billion Hispanic market is the nation's ninth-largest Hispanic market, accounting for 5% of the state's total buying power, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia.
One of the biggest questions raised by the Census projections is where 140 million additional people will live by 2050. Such growth could have profound implications on the way Americans live, say some analysts who study issues such as growth and sprawl.
"It's almost impossible to envision how we could find the resources, to say nothing of the land, to accommodate that level of growth in population in the same spaced-out way we did in the 1990s," says David Goldberg, communications director of Smart Growth America, a Washington-based coalition of about 100 advocacy groups.
For example, he says, if the 29-county Atlanta metropolitan area grew by 49% to about 6 million and followed previous growth patterns, "the region would be something like 250 miles across."
But Goldberg says financial problems in many states are forcing political leaders to seek more efficient alternatives to sprawl. "It's slowly dawning on people across the country that they have to find better ways," he says.
The Census projections offer other glimpses of how the population could change:
The number of African-Americans will rise 71% to 61.4 million. Their share of t
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more like robosexual am I right?